A Few Drawings Are All We’ve Got Left: The Pop-Up Magazine Picture Book

The hand-drawn cover of a book inspired by the stories told at Pop-Up Magazine, a live event.

Anyone who’s been to Pop-Up Magazine, the hugely popular magazine-talent-show, knows the shtick — the show is live and deliberately not recorded or televised in any way. Until now. For its sixth issue in San Francisco, editor in chief Douglas McGray and company invited Jason Polan, the artist behind the Every Person in New York Project to draw what he heard that night, in real time.

Polan, who draws weekly column “Things I Saw” for The New York Times, sat in the audience and filled two sketchpads, then handed them over to the Pop-Up crew, who scanned the drawings and sent them over to the DIY book-publishing site Blurb. “What I drew while people were presenting is what is in the book,” Polan says. “I did not change anything.”

Drawings inspired by Pop-Up magazine contributors Annie Murphy, who spoke on a family marked by exile, and Lisa Hamilton, who recounted the coming-of-age of a cattle auctioneer

What story inspired Polan most? “I drew a caveman during Starlee Kine’s talk that I liked, but for the most part I do not remember what I was drawing because I was focusing on what people were saying and I was nervous I was going to miss something.”

Pop-Up tickets are notoriously hard to get these days. (This writer opened two browsers and refreshed constantly to end up with nosebleed seats).

If you ended up missing the show, don’t miss this. The book is on sale at Blurb now.